In this long and ambitious book Feeney treats epic poetry from
Apollonius to Statius, using each poet's handling of the gods to place his
work in its intellectual and historical context. The result is a stunning
synthesis of literary and intellectual history, supported, as readers of
Feeney's several important articles on Vergil have come to expect, by
acute and stimulating literary analysis.

Feeney uses his introduction and first long chapter ("The
Critics") to lay out his principal themes, discussing not only the ways in
which ancient critics read the gods of epic but also the attitudes of both
poets and critics to fiction. (Although he modestly exempts professional
classicists from reading pages 5-33 in the belief that most of it will be
"quite familiar", they should not take his advice.) His argument rests on
two propositions. First, that the epic tradition includes the critics as
well as the poets, and that post-Homeric poets were steeped in the
conventions of ancient exegesis: "the representation of the divine in
post-Homeric
epic was not and could not be an unmediated response to earlier poetry,
but found its forms within a rich and complex intellectual environment"
(p. 2). Second, that depicting or
reading the gods in epic is a problem of fiction, of the poet's authority
both to claim that his literary fictions are true and to command belief
from his audience.

Poems so self-consciously conceived demand a
corresponding strategy from the reader, who must understand above all that
truth is a matter of context and genre. Thus: "the gods existed for the
ancients according to the rules of the particular context in which they
were encountered, whether that be epic, lyric, cult or philosophy.... It
is, or ought to be, a truism that our experience of any object or concept
is, to some degree, a function of the medium through which we experience
it." (p.45) In fact, ancient critics, as Feeney reminds us (p. 47),
expressed this idea by their hierarchy of the three theologies: of poets,
of the state, and of philosophers. Similarly, the critics conceived of
three levels or kinds of literary reality: historia (setting out
what actually happened), plasma (telling of imaginary events as if
they were
real), muthos (exposition of what never happened). Readers who
interpret muthos as if it were historia or plasma
mistake the genre before them and misread or read out the gods of epic.
Feeney is properly emphatic on this point: "A special handicap for most
moderns as readers of ancient epic is our insensible assumption of the
naturalistic novel as the norm for
narrative - a norm which itself often remains unexamined, since
classicists tend to assume that naturalism is 'natural'" (p. 43).

This groundwork established, Feeney goes on to develop his argument in six
chapters: on Apollonius, Naevius and Ennius, Vergil, Ovid, Lucan and
Silius Italicus, Valerius Flaccus and Statius. Readers should resist the
temptation to read only the chapter/s on their favorite poets. Although
each chapter is self-contained (or nearly so), certain themes recur, and
the reader who follows them will come to see each poem both in its place
in the tradition and in a kind of dialogue with the others on essential
topics such as: the authority of the narrator, Herakles/Hercules as the
bridge between human and divine (and as the model for other divinized
mortals), and the epic as the arena for the fulfillment or accomplishment
of divine will.

A few examples will suffice (though this bald
sketch does small justice to Feeney's richly nuanced discussion).

Apollonius reveals the will of Zeus only at the end of the poem and never
represents Zeus at all. Feeney argues that his confidence as a narrator is
increasingly undermined as his aetiologies "become more and more
problematic, anchoring contemporary and real facts in a past which
becomes less and less 'real' as the poem goes on..." (p. 93). The gods in
their encounters with the heroes are only obliquely represented and
perceived -- just as Aphrodite, the first god represented in the poem, is
shown only in a reflection from Ares' shield in the ecphrasis of Jason's
cloak (1.742-6). In the estrangement of gods and men in Apollonius'
Hellenistic world only Herakles can bridge the gulf, and he only
obliquely. After Herakles' loss to the Argonauts in Book 1 the sea god
Glaukos predicts his eventual apotheosis if he can complete
his labors; in Book 4 the heroes find themselves in the Garden of the
Hesperides, where they are saved from thirst by the spring Herakles had
opened the day before, after completing his labors. Although the
Argonauts do not succeed in their attempt to catch up with Herakles, the
sharp-eyed Lynceus thinks he can see him far off -- and the poet uses a
simile that Vergil was to borrow for Aeneas' vision of Dido in the
underworld -- "as you see the moon, or think you see the moon, on the
first day of the month, all obscured" (4.1477-80, Feeney's translation,
p. 96). "He has gone virtually all the way down the path towards becoming
a god, and that is the extraordinary interstitial point which Apollonius
captures in that beautiful moment when Lynceus sees him in the far
distance, or thinks he sees him. In this last mention of him in the poem,
he is passing out of the world of men, and into the world of gods. In
saving his companions, even in his absence, he has already begun to fulfil
the functions of a god" (p. 97).

Naevius and Ennius, Feeney
argues, built on Apollonius
and added new themes that would be taken up by Vergil and his successors.
Perhaps most important is their exploitation of the identification of
Jupiter with Zeus, which conflated the supreme god of Rome with the
"pan-Hellenic" and "supranational" god whose particular patronage was
claimed by no single Greek state. For the universality of Zeus was just
the point of "the shattering assertion" that "the god who ordains the
destiny of the world, the guiding force of the universe, is the god of
Rome and her empire" (p. 115). Other gods, too, gained Roman nationalistic
associations and could be seen as responding both to Homeric, mythological
motives and to Roman, historical motives (sometimes at the same time) --
as Venus is both Aphrodite and the Roman Venus genetrix and Juno
both Homer's Hera and Tanit, patroness of the Carthaginians.

The
Aeneid opens with a demonstration of the multiple natures of Juno
(Tanit, Hera, physical allegory of aer, goddess of marriage), but
Jupiter, too, Feeney argues, operates in many ways -- as the god of
aether,
as "god of
Rome, husband of Juno, father of Venus". Jupiter, like Juno, is a
character in the narrative, with the
result that: "even his perspective is unavailable as a neutral,
dispassionate vantage-point. There is no Archimedean hypothetical point in
space from which to regard the action of the poem and evaluate it. Every
vantage-point the poem offers is inextricable, part of a competition of
views" (p. 155). (I digress here to observe that this idea alone, with its
implications for the interpretation of the poem as a whole, is worth the
price of the book.) Vergil's Hercules is a link between divine and human
perspectives, as Feeney demonstrates in his discussion of Hercules' brief
appearance in Book 10, when he is shown weeping for the death of Pallas:
"He [Vergil] traces Hercules down that path where even Lynceus could not
see, and shows him to us at its far end, as a god" (p. 156).

The
Vergil chapter is the climax and culmination of the first half of the
book: all of Feeney's previous discussion seems to have had the
Aeneid as
its telos, and the book might well have ended here. The result
would have
been a less important (if more manageable) study, for the themes Feeney
has traced through Apollonius, Naevius, Ennius, and Vergil reverberate
through the later epics as well, and in some cases provide their starting
point. The difficulty, to the extent that there is one, is that Feeney's
argument is cumulative, and keeps picking up motifs as it goes along. His
snowball begins to feel like an avalanche in the Ovid chapter. The
Metamorphoses is the essential pivot (or as Feeney calls it,
"something of an intermezzo", p. 188) between Hellenistic-Augustan and
Imperial epic.
All the themes traced in the earlier epics land in this chapter, and new
ones are introduced as well. The fault is really Ovid's, for he can keep
more balls in the air than any of his critics; but one still has to admit
that the Ovid chapter tries to do too much. It is confusing to read, and
its direction is sometimes unclear. Nonetheless, it contains many
excellent observations (some of which a less ambitious critic might have
developed in separate articles), and it is essential for the discussion of
the later poets, especially Lucan.
Especially important is Ovid's treatment of Augustus' appropriation of the
gods, which Feeney sees as paving the way for Lucan's exclusion of the
gods from the Bellum Civile: "As Ovid had already seen, from any
viewpoint which was unsympathetic to what the emperors had done to the
res publica,
the divine characters of Naevius, Ennius, and Vergil were no longer
available as a vehicle for communal meaning, since they had become the
creatures of the princeps" (p. 294).

I am all too aware that
this is a rather uncritical review, but this is the kind of book that
doesn't come along very often. To put it briefly: Feeney's book is
essential reading for anyone interested in epic after Homer. (It has the
additional merit of a very full and up-to-date bibliography and generous
citation of previous works.) Lest I appear fulsome, however, I can point
to two defects: a) the book's hair-raising price ($98), and b) Feeney's
occasional descent into theoretical jargon (e.g., "The poem has to
authenticate its own fictions by exploiting the capacity for
assent which is present in the society's range of discourses about
religion and the divine." p. 180). You should buy it anyway (if you really
care about epic you won't wait for the paperback).